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May 31, 2009

Woman in the News: Sonia Gandhi

By James Lamont

Published: May 22 2009 19:46 | Last updated: May 22 2009 19:46

Within
India’s Congress party, Sonia Gandhi is known simply as “Madam”. Having
finished a month of sari-clad election appearances from West Bengal to
Tamil Nadu, “Madam” spent this week meeting prospective cabinet
ministers at her residence at 10 Janpath in New Delhi, overseeing the
formation of a new government.

A little over a decade ago, the
Italian-born widow of Rajiv Gandhi, the slain Indian former prime
minister, was less predictable. Then she was described as an enigma,
sphinx-like. She was a deeply private person, whose aversion to the
limelight kept people guessing whether she would be drawn into politics
and provide the missing link to preserve the power of the country’s
Nehru-Gandhi ruling dynasty.

A
decidedly reluctant politician, her first priority then was the
well-being of her children. Ruling the world’s largest democracy was
hardly an ambition, more an unsought duty.

Her party’s electoral triumph
last weekend marks an extraordinary personal feat. As its leader since
1998, she has rebuilt India’s largest political party. In doing so, she
has assured the continuity of the Nehru-Gandhi family after the
assassinations of her husband and mother-in-law. She has also upheld
the national secular vision of India won by Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s
first prime minister, in 1947 at the end of British rule. Her children,
Rahul and Priyanka, are carefully positioned to follow her example.

These
achievements have taken considerable courage. In public, she cuts a
dignified, determined figure – with the solitary aura of royalty among
her courtiers. She is not given to long discussion, speaking curtly in
accented English or Hindi. But to become her party’s undisputed leader
she has had to face down jibes and misgivings about her Italian
origins, her personal faith and her intellectual prowess.

Mrs
Gandhi, 62, has repeatedly defied expectations. In the first place, as
a young widow she chose India above her home country. She revitalised a
party lacking ideas and in decline, its support splintering into
smaller parties based on caste and regional interests. In 2004, she
unseated the Bharatiya Janata party and its leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee
in an election no one expected her to win.

She sprang another
surprise this month. Congress won an emphatic victory, taking 206 seats
in the 545-seat parliament, far more than the 150 forecast. With its
allies, the party has easily secured a majority to form the next
government.

Sonia Maino was born in a village close to Vicenza in
north-east Italy. Daughter of a building contractor and former soldier,
she grew up in the industrial town of Orbassano, near Turin. It was
Cambridge, in the UK, that was to change her life. It was there that
she met her future husband, Rajiv, while he was studying at Trinity
College. She was attending a local language school when she caught his
eye and they fell in love. In 1968, they married – an improbable match
for a scion of India’s political class, where social status counts for
much. Yet, Mrs Gandhi remembers a welcome from her mother-in-law,
Indira, while her own father was more cautious about her choice.

A
life in politics then was not a given. Rajiv became a commercial pilot.
Both eschewed public roles, and briefly lived abroad again after Indira
was ousted from power in 1977. But a series of premature deaths changed
everything. First Rajiv’s brother and the political heir, Sanjay, died
in a flying accident in 1980. Then Indira was gunned down by her Sikh
bodyguards. Rajiv, a man of ideas, was pitched into the premiership
aged 40 in an overwhelming sympathy vote for Congress after his
mother’s death. Then he, too, was killed on the election trail in Tamil
Nadu by a suicide bomber.

On Rajiv’s death a stoic journey began
for Mrs Gandhi, supported by her husband’s friends. She set about
ridding herself of her foreign identity and venerating her late
husband’s memory. She emphasised her Indian identity above her Italian,
wearing only saris in public and adopting local mannerisms. Her native
tongue was dropped. She visited temples and even took a dip in the holy
Ganges river in 2001.

She needed strong survival instincts. As her political role
became clear, she was jeered by her opponents as an uneducated
housewife, unsuitable for leadership in New Delhi because of her
foreign origins.

“She’s not a political animal,” says Yogendra Yadav, senior
fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New
Delhi. “Her question is not ‘How will this benefit me?’ It is rather,
‘Is it good?’ You don’t have many politicians asking that question.”

He describes her as benevolent and loyal to her allies, sometimes beyond their expiry date.

“Her
grasp of local politics is still very general and she’s not in the
nitty-gritty of political management at the state level, instead
handing it over to political managers who turn out – or not – to be
smart or straight.”

Mrs Gandhi has proved to have enormous
popular appeal. First, she is a Gandhi, which continues to have
powerful resonance with the voters across the country. The Congress
party shamelessly campaigns on the family brand, with her and son Rahul
alongside Manmohan Singh, the prime minister, on almost all its posters.

Second,
she has inherited her mother-in-law’s left-of-centre economic views and
prioritises the needs of the rural poor, most of India’s 1.2bn people.
She delivers a simple message of caring for common people in a country
with a large social deficit, is unimpressed by notions of India’s
superpowerdom, and is suspicious of the free market.

Some commentators argue her appeal stems from national sympathy
for her widowhood. Others claim her renunciation of the premiership in
2004, in favour of Mr Singh, earned her huge credit. In a country where
politicians rarely make self-sacrifices, her step back from power was
regarded as astonishing.

Others are more critical. They say that Mrs Gandhi, like other
Indian leaders, has corrupted some agencies of the state – most
blatantly in quashing the pursuit of Italian businessman Ottavio
Quattrocchi, during Rajiv’s government. She is also viewed as an adept
political operator, who has placed loyalists in the presidency and
election commission to consolidate Congress’s influence. Within the
party, she stifles leadership that might impede her family’s ascendancy.

As
her meetings in the library of 10 Janpath conclude and ministers take
up their new jobs, the Gandhi inheritance looks safer now than in
almost two decades.

Wolfram Alpha asks some searching questions of the web

By John Gapper

Published: May 22 2009 19:36 | Last updated: May 22 2009 19:36

For
years, there has been little competition in the business of enabling
people to find out things on the web: Google led and a bunch of its
would-be rivals lagged behind. Suddenly, however, internet search is
becoming lively again.

Next week, Microsoft will launch its latest effort to catch up with Google – a refreshed search engine codenamed Kumo. Meanwhile Yahoo
has just shown off its own efforts to help people extract data from the
internet’s millions of web pages, rather than wade through it link by
link.

All this might be yawn-inducing – Microsoft and Yahoo have tried and failed to catch up with Google before – but for two things.

One
is that Google, despite its 64 per cent share of search, according to
the comScore research group, knows there is a gulf between what it
provides and what many people want and is experimenting with making its
search engine perform better.

The second is that Google faces a
new challenge from an Illinois-based software group founded by Stephen
Wolfram, a British scientist. This week, Wolfram Research launched Wolfram Alpha, a web application that resembles a search engine but aspires to be a digital oracle.

Wolfram
Alpha will never rival Google as an entry point to the web because it
serves up information from a private database, rather than the internet
as a whole. But it is an intellectual slap in the face to Google
because it approaches the quest for knowledge in another way.

Wolfram
Alpha’s launch this week garnered a lot of hype and many people were
disappointed. After receiving blank responses to queries that its
software could not recognise – “Wolfram Alpha isn’t sure what to do
with your input” – some gave up.

Even when it knows what to do
with a query, the software is very curt on some subjects that would
return thousands of web pages, videos and images on Google, and a
detailed entry on Wikipedia.

Type “Barack Obama”, for example,
and you are told his full name, his birth date and place, and that he
is a head of state (although not of which country). The timeline of his
life has no entries apart from his birth.

But it is a different
story when it comes to scientific and mathematical data, or the sort of
information held routinely on public databases such as the Central
Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook or by the International Monetary
Fund. Then Wolfram Alpha comes to life.

Enter “Halley’s Comet”
and you get scientific details and a map of where it is at any moment.
Enter “GDP per capita UK/GDP per capita US” and it builds a graph
showing that Britons were half as rich as Americans in 1970 but
approached parity by 2005.

The data are not drawn from the web
but from a database that is “curated” by Wolfram Research, a company
that makes most of its money by selling licences for Mathematica, a
software package used in colleges. That makes it much more limited than
the internet, but clean, precise and easily malleable. While search
engines are a starting point in a quest to find things out, Wolfram
Alpha provides complete answers.

Unlike Wikipedia, it is also
tightly controlled. Its data are drawn only from sources that are
edited and checked so that, at least in theory, all the information is
trustworthy.

“Search engines are like traffic directions to
everything, systematic and random, that is on the web. We are
collecting knowledge accumulated by civilisations and making that data
computable,” says Mr Wolfram.

Search engines are now trying to do
something similar with the internet as a whole, but it is very
difficult. “One of the hardest problems in computer science is data
extraction. Can we look at the unstructured web and extract values and
facts in a meaningful way?” asked Marissa Mayer, a Google executive, at
a presentation last week.

Ms Mayer showed off Google Squared, an
experimental new feature that would allow Google’s users quickly to
assemble data about, for example, various breeds of small dogs in a
form like a spreadsheet.

It would be a lot easier to achieve if
data were written into web pages in a structured way. Tim Berners-Lee,
one of the creators of the internet in its graphical form, has been
working on a project called the “semantic web”, which encourages this
approach, but progress has been slow.

That is what makes Wolfram
Alpha so radical – it is a challenge not just to Google but to the
internet as a whole. Instead of grappling with all the data that are
theoretically discoverable on the web, Mr Wolfram has got around the
difficulties by building his own black box.

Similar struggles
for dominance between private databases and open information systems
are common. In financial services, stock exchanges contend with “dark
pools” of liquidity – private networks of banks and institutional
investors that allow them to trade with each other.

So far in the
history of the internet, the public has soundly defeated the private.
Private networks such as the original AOL and Compuserve gave way to
the internet as a whole, made comprehensible by Google.

Now that
faces a challenge. If all the data on the internet are simply too messy
to be analysed and structured, Google will be unable to produce a
service rivalling Wolfram Alpha in clarity and reliability.

This
would not spell the end for Google and other search engines. But it
would mean that search itself – on which we rely to map the internet –
had bumped up against its natural limits. Let the battle begin.

A Race Like No Other: 26.2 Miles Through the Streets of New YorkBy Liz RobbinsHarper £14.99, 336 pagesFT Bookshop price: £11.59

In
the 1970s large numbers of people began running for the first time.
John L Parker, himself a former champion runner, wrote a novel about
the habit in 1978. But no publisher wanted Once A Runner, so Parker self-published it.

He
sold copies at races out of the boot of his car, and a cult developed
around the book. In 2007, search engine BookFinder rated it the most
sought after out-of-print book in the US. This spring, the book was
republished – this time by Scribner, a commercial publisher in the US.

Now,
a bunch of books on running has arrived at once. One of them, by
Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, even achieved a rare honour for a
translated memoir of being advertised on posters on the London
Underground. All these books tackle the great question that a Parisian
reclining on a park bench once shouted at me as I lumbered into the
woods: “Why?”.

So why do we run?

Running long distances
used to be considered beyond most humans, like visiting the moon.
Phidippides, who is credited with running the first marathon in 490BC,
supposedly died on the spot straight afterwards. As late as the 1960s
it was considered unacceptable to run around your neighbourhood in
sweaty clothes. The New York City marathon is now the biggest race on
earth; when it was first held in 1970, there were only 126 male
participants and one woman. The winners received unused bowling
trophies.

Many things were changing at that time. The social
revolutions of 1968 inaugurated the era of “informalisation”, the
spread of permissive behaviour. It became acceptable to run around town
in the new sports kit that Nike and others were making. Even old women
were now allowed to play sport in public. Many old people found running
congenial. Born To Run, Christopher McDougall’s book on people
who run vast distances, even unearths a 96-year-old ultra-runner.
McDougall, a magazine journalist and runner, also reports that
64-year-olds average the same pace in marathons as 19-year-olds.

Today
“distance running is the world’s number one participation sport”, says
McDougall. Indeed, judging by these books, many people now identify
themselves above all else as runners. No wonder they want to read about
running.

It’s no coincidence that the running craze also took
off at the same time as the obesity epidemic. People worried more about
their health, and sought solitary sports that they didn’t have to do in
the old social units. “You don’t need anybody else to do it,” gloats
Murakami, explaining why he began running in 1982. Political scientist
Robert Putnam has written of a social trend towards “bowling alone” –
people taking their leisure alone rather than in groups. Running, too,
was a sport for an atomised society.

Runners divide into two
distinct tribes. The first consists of casual runners: those of us who
trudge a couple of painful miles to lose weight and perhaps live a bit
longer.

One reason people run – and read running books – is
that casual running often confers status. Jogging is considered an
outward marker of achievement. It helps draw the American class divide
between the thin and the fat. For example, a daily group jog in Central
Park, starting at 5.30am, features “many of New York’s top executives,
lawyers and traders”. One author, Liz Robbins, calls it a “power
breakfast”.

Casual runners are rational actors – we understand
what they get out of it. More baffling are serious runners: the smaller
tribe that runs ever longer distances.

These books draw a
cumulative psychological profile of the serious runner. Many of them
have abandoned marathons for double marathons and worse. There is
always a next step, such as the six-day, 151-mile Marathon des Sables,
or Marathon of the Sands, across the Sahara.

Serious runners
don’t do it for their health – they massacre their joints. But their
motives aren’t easily captured in words. It’s as hard for them to
explain why they do it as it is for an astronaut to describe walking on
the moon. We will never go there.

That may be why none of these
books entirely satisfies – and also why many serious runners appear to
be hermits. Parker’s hero, for example, is a miler named Cassidy. He’s
suspended from his Florida college during a 1970s controversy over the
length of athletes’ hair, and ends up a hermit living in a cabin.

Murakami,
too, takes up running after moving to the Japanese countryside. And
McDougall’s book climaxes in a 50-mile race “in a sniper-patrolled
corner of the Mexican outback”, home to the isolated Tarahumara
Indians, famed long-distance runners.

Running, it seems, offers
an escape from the world, with all its chores, noise and complications.
We casual runners sometimes imagine that serious runners get time to
think. Rather, according to Murakami and Parker, part of the pleasure
is entering a trance in which you don’t think. You can run away.

In
explaining why people run, McDougall returns to human origins. Drawing
on scientific research, he argues that we were, literally, “born to
run”. After man first stood erect, he probably survived by running
animals to death. Humans were slower than antelopes and many other
mammals, but could keep going longer. We hunted in packs, and after a
couple of hours our prey would generally collapse.

The Bushmen
of the Kalahari desert – Africa’s last hunter-gatherers – have remained
excellent long-distance runners, he notes. Indeed, some time in the
1960s, a South-West African policeman, in a spirit of scientific
inquiry, chased a Bushman in his Land Rover over sandy, bush terrain,
and the little runner kept going for almost a whole day. Nowadays most
of us hate long runs because we don’t have to do them; our brain urges
us to relax. But some capacity remains.

Serious runners don’t
seem concerned with pleasure. These books seldom dwell on the “runner’s
high” – the famous release of endorphins. Instead, Parker’s novel has
some gruesome descriptions of racing. Here’s Cassidy winning the
biggest mile race of his life: “… it hurts but go all the way
through do not stop until you are past it you cannot afford to give the
son of a bitch anything … so holdit holdit holdit Jesus Christ hold it
holditholdit HOLDITHOLDITHOLD IT …”

In different ways these books tell us that serious runners
welcome pain. Indeed, that may even be the point of running. “If pain
weren’t involved, who in the world would ever go to the trouble of
taking part in sports like the triathlon or the marathon,” asks
Murakami. “It’s precisely because we want to overcome that pain that we
can get the feeling, through this process, of really being alive – or at least a partial sense of it.”

Serious
runners push through pain to touch their human limits. Murakami writes:
“Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s
the essence of running, and a metaphor for life – and for me, for
writing as well.”

For Parker, this touching of limits is what
distinguishes serious runners from the rest of us: “Fleeing from an
armed killer or deadly animal, a layman will soon find the frightening
limits that even stark terror will not overcome. The runner knows such
boundaries like he knows the sidewalks of his own neighbourhood.”

At
our human limits, we apparently feel not joy but a sense of
achievement. And that is another reason why running took off after
1968. In the age of meritocracy, achievement became a dominant value.
Running is an achievement that almost everyone can have.

This becomes apparent in A Race Like No Other,
a mercilessly positive account of the New York City marathon by Liz
Robbins, a New York Times reporter. Practically every runner in the
book is a confident yet humble hero who triumphs against the odds. “The
will to live and the will to win carry 38,676 today to the limit and
beyond,” Robbins tells us. However, another of her numbers gives the
game away: only 1,129 runners fail to finish the race. This is a
Herculean task that you don’t need to be Hercules to complete. Even
Oprah Winfrey has run a marathon.

The South African Oscar Pistorius, author of Blade Runner,
exemplifies the runner as an unlikely achiever. He was born without
fibula bones, and as a baby had both his legs amputated. But he became
a winner nonetheless. Injured in a rugby match, he turned sprinter by
accident. In his first race he unknowingly smashed a world record for
runners with his disability. Soon he was fast enough to compete against
the best runners with legs. Pistorius has become a symbol of
achievement, or as he puts it, “a superhero for disabled people
worldwide”.

Some of these books will struggle to appeal beyond
the runners’ ghetto. Parker nicely conveys the horrors of running, but
the book’s cult status among serious runners remains a mystery to me.
Murakami’s memoir is a gentle read but the incessant banalities are
reminiscent of Adrian Mole’s diary. Here’s
the great author on the aftermath of a knee twinge: “The next morning,
after I woke up, washed my face, and drank a cup of coffee, I tried
walking down the stairs in our apartment building.” Lo, the twinge has
gone.

Pistorius is a simple Christian with no literary pretensions. Blade Runner is an extraordinary story but an ordinary book.

Robbins
would make a great researcher: excellent legwork, shame about the tin
ear. No detail is too insignificant for her to record, and she helps
purvey fantasies about noble savages: “Lel [a Kenyan runner] believes
that more than anything about growing up in the Rift Valley – the
starchy diet or the altitude of 5,000 to 10,000ft above sea level or
the long runs to school – the Kalenjin warrior heritage is what makes
Kenyan runners so successful.” Devoutly as I admire Kalenjin heritage,
I suspect that their diet, altitude and daily long-distance running
help them rather more.

Robbins’s book suffers from its
overwritten opening. McDougall’s does too – the overwritten opening is
a staple of contemporary American non-fiction. But Born To Run later
recovers. McDougall eventually slows down, breathes out, and reaches
the state of bliss that runners, or so we are told, very occasionally
experience in the midst of an endless run.

All these books may
prove relics of our time, however. A report, “Sport Participation in
the European Union”, published in 2005 by a Dutch centre for research
on sports in society, says the growth of running has stagnated since
the 1990s. “Diverse fitness sports” have taken off instead. Activities
such as Pilates, yoga and treadmills are good for the heart and
waistline but they don’t destroy the knees. Future generations may
wonder how we ever hit upon such a painful and unprofitable craze.

Bookshop backwaters

By Harry Eyres

Published: May 30 2009 01:31 | Last updated: May 30 2009 01:31

You
might think that I have little interest in the retail sector (more
Brûlé territory); in fact, I suffer from a rare condition called
“emporiophobia”. Far from being attracted to shops, I shun them.
Imprisoned within a department store, I develop symptoms of panic,
disorientation and, after about 40 minutes, loss of the will to live.
There are exceptions. As a young child I was fascinated by fishmongers
and, to a lesser extent, butchers. I like good food markets,
delicatessens and specialist cheese shops. But my favourite shops are
bookshops.

Of course writers love bookshops. They may haunt them,
secretly hauling down their own works from high and invisible shelves
and positioning them in front of rivals’ publications. But they may
also despair of them, seeing the strange company of the sartorially
challenged who frequent them, often with no intention of making a
purchase.

Surely the picture I am giving is out of date. Didn’t
the arrival in London of Waterstone’s and then of the impeccably smart
chain Daunt Books change all that, filling their wood-panelled stores
with well-heeled professionals and yummy mummies? But the smartness of
Waterstone’s proved its undoing: Tim Waterstone sold out to WH Smith as
long ago as 1989 and now these stylish-looking emporia are piled with
three-for-two offers, the betrayal of everything truly bookish.
Three-for-two offers might be suitable for budget lavatory cleaners but
never for books.

In fact, while Waterstone’s and Daunt Books were
coming to prominence, some irreplaceable independent London bookshops
disappeared. Compendium in Camden and Bernard Stone’s Turret Bookshop
(which migrated from Kensington to various venues in Covent Garden)
were the only bookshops truly serious about, respectively, philosophy
and poetry, and now both have gone. Of course the situation was and
remains much better in America, where truly great bookshops such as
Powells of Portland, Oregon, and Elliott Bay Books of Seattle continue
to thrive. But London came close to having no proper bookshops at all.

Salvation
has come from an unlikely quarter. Foyles was always London’s biggest
independent bookshop, but also its most dingy, chaotic and, not in the
best sense, Dickensian. There was a strange system of queuing up to get
a ticket, then queuing up again to pay, then queuing up a third time to
collect the book. People who worked there told dark tales of employment
practices from another century. Foyles was a place you went to only
when you had to, because an obscure or out-of-print tome was stocked
there and nowhere else; it was not a place associated with pleasure.

Suddenly
all that has changed. I could hardly believe the transformation when I
went there recently to take part in a recent event on “wine and words”.
Foyles now has probably the most attractive café in central London,
modelled on the ones in the great American bookstores but more lively,
with jazz at weekends. There is a gallery on the top floor where
frequent events and readings are held; it also boasts a fine Yamaha
grand piano, so you can catch pianists of the calibre of the brilliant
young Scot Stephen Osborne limbering up for Wigmore or Southbank
recitals with lunchtime run-throughs.

Next to the gallery is a
particularly good music section, with an excellent collection of sheet
music, as well as carefully chosen CDs and DVDs (the huge Waterstone’s
in Piccadilly, by contrast has a pathetic selection of classical CDs
and no music DVDs whatsoever, apart from a few hackneyed opera films).
I don’t know whether this pays its way in terms of shelf space, but it
feels profoundly civilised. The sound of your columnist playing
Mozart’s “easy” Sonata in C from the adjoining gallery was enough to
persuade one customer to buy a complete set of Mozart piano sonatas –
the right degree of distance making the heart grow fonder, or the wrong
notes inaudible.

Foyles is a family business, not a faceless
global chain; we know from Dickens (Clennam & Co) that family
businesses are not always benign, but, at their best, they permit
someone to express a personal vision through an enterprise, without
being excessively beholden to accountants. What happened at Foyles was
a generational shift; following the death of Christina Foyle, doyenne
or battle-axe according to taste, in 1999, her nephew Christopher
decided to refurbish the store and modernise the company, opening three
other smaller shops in London. Some apparently still miss the old
chaotic and bad-tempered Foyle’s, but they must be people who prefer
overcast gloom to sunshine.

Why does this matter? The point is
that, as I and other emporiophobics know, bookshops are not really
shops at all, or not simply shops. They occupy a peculiar no-man’s-land
between the private and public sectors.

Some of them are more
like libraries or clubs than shops – Joseph’s Bookstore in Golders
Green is one such place. Bernard Stone ran three publishing ventures
alongside his bookshop.

That was why the poet Michael Horowitz
was able to describe the Turret Bookshop as “the merriest backwater of
the time”. Backwaters can be curiously important in the literary
culture.

Just Plane Fun

Kirk Hawkins's company gives sport flying a lift.

by John Maas

Kirk Hawkins’s invention has
much in common with the European roadsters Hawkins has long admired. It
has an elegant interior, leather bucket seats, and a sleek, aerodynamic
design. Even its name, Icon A5, suggests a sports-car pedigree. But
whereas a Porsche is merely fast, the A5 can really fly.

An
amphibious airplane with a 34-foot wingspan and a 100-horsepower
engine, the A5 is part of the first generation of a stylish class of
“light-sport” aircraft designed for casual pilots. According to
Hawkins, founder and CEO of Icon, the plane “allows people who were
intimidated by aviation to say, ‘I can do this.’”

Hawkins,
MS ’95, MS ’05, says the inspiration for the A5 runs back a long way.
“I was a power-sports kid,” enthralled with ATVs and Jet Skis. His
interest in motor sports led him to aviation: he spent eight years
flying F-16s in the Air Force. Then, while Hawkins was a student at the
Graduate School of Business in 2004, the Federal Aviation
Administration introduced a “sport-pilot license,” allowing virtually
anyone with a valid driver’s license and 20 hours of training to fly.

Hawkins
believed that sport flying provided a viable business model for the
plane he was dreaming up. Adventurous high-end consumers might become
pilots if the right airplane could convince them to get certified. He
recruited Steen Strand, whom he had met in a course in Stanford’s
product design program, and the two incorporated Icon in 2006.
Engineering began that same year, and a flying prototype took off in
summer 2008. The company is looking for a permanent manufacturing
facility, and expects to begin mass production soon after flight
testing is completed later this year.

Hawkins’s flying
experience shaped the A5’s functionality, but it was his exposure to
the product design program that influenced the plane’s look and feel.
Hawkins credits the program’s multidisciplinary nature and
consumer-oriented approach for Icon’s product strategy. “We wouldn’t
exist without Stanford,” he says. Strand, Icon’s chief operating
officer, agrees, pointing out the company’s signature accent color.
“That’s why it’s red,” he jokes.

IN DEMAND: Orders for the A5 are strong despite the recession.

Courtesy Icon

The
FAA has 13 design stipulations for the planes sport pilots are allowed
to fly: no more than one passenger in addition to the pilot, for
example, and a relatively plodding top speed of 120 knots. Established
companies and upstarts alike hurried to produce light-sport designs,
although their approaches varied. “Most of the companies were making
less-expensive versions of their current aircraft,” Strand says. “I
wanted to make an airplane look cool.”

The A5 design team
saw the restrictions as an opportunity. The plane’s low operating speed
demands less aerodynamic precision and therefore allows greater
aesthetic freedom. Thus, features like the crease on the nose that
Strand points to as a choice made purely for appearance’s sake.

Strand,
when asked about the design inspirations for the A5, rattles off
Ferrari, Aston Martin, Porsche and BMW. Many Icon designers first
worked in the auto industry, and it shows in features like the A5’s
instrument panel—an easily readable set of dials more like a dashboard
than the intimidating array of knobs and gauges in a traditional
cockpit.

The
A5’s wings fold flat against the fuselage, making it small enough to
store in most garages, and it can be towed behind a car or truck—in an
Icon-designed trailer.

One might assume the biggest barrier
to success for the fledgling company would be the cost of the
airplane—$139,000—at a time when even wealthy potential customers have
been hammered by the recession. And the potential market is relatively
small—although growing, the number of licensed sport pilots is less
than 5,000. Yet Icon’s order book continues to fill, and Hawkins and
Strand report strong interest, especially from overseas. At press time,
Icon held deposits on more than 300 planes, enough orders to carry the
Los Angeles-based company from the first delivery in late 2010 through
2013. And Icon has no immediate plans to move beyond the light-sport
category. “There are so many to be made and sold,” Strand says. “Why
bother?”

As for Hawkins, the tough business climate is just
another challenge to relish and overcome. “We set extremely high bars
for ourselves,” he says. “You’re always pushing it.”

May 23, 2009

Behind the Scenes: Man in the Pink Boxers

By David W. DunlapArmy
Spc. Zachary Boyd of Fort Worth battles the Taliban on Monday in
Afghanistan as he wears his "I love NY" boxer shorts. Boyd rushed from
his sleeping quarters to join his fellow platoon members.

Updated | 2:50 p.m., Friday, May 22.
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has reassured Specialist Zachary
Boyd, stationed in Afghanistan, that his military career is in no
danger for having appeared on the front page of The New York Times
dressed for combat in pink boxers and flip-flops. Quite the contrary.

Sometimes the public recognition isn’t always expected —
or necessarily welcomed. Specialist Zachary Boyd recently was enjoying
a well-deserved sleep when his post in eastern Afghanistan came under
enemy attack. He immediately grabbed his rifle and rushed into a
defensive position clad in his helmet, body armor, and pink boxer
shorts that said “I Love New York.”

Unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on your perspective — an
A.P. photographer was there for a candid shot, a photo which ran
shortly thereafter on the front page of The New York Times. Boyd later
told his parents that “I may not have a job anymore after the president
has seen me out of uniform.”

Well, let me tell you, the next time I visit Afghanistan I want to
meet Specialist Boyd and shake his hand. Any soldier who goes into
battle against the Taliban in pink boxers and flip-flops has a special
kind of courage. And I can only wonder about the impact on the Taliban.
Just imagine seeing that — a guy in pink boxers and flip-flops has you
in his crosshairs — what an incredible innovation in psychological
warfare. I can assure you that Specialist Boyd’s job is very safe
indeed.

Original Post | 1:33 p.m., Thursday, May 21. Of
course, “Obama” is among the top search terms on The Times’s Web site.
And given the recent elections, it is no surprise that “India,” too,
ranks high on the list. Sadly, “cancer” is also among the most
frequently searched phrases. But on Tuesday, something strange popped
up in the No. 10 position: “pink boxers.”

Marc Frons, the chief technology officer at The Times, made the
discovery as he perused the list that afternoon. “I saw ‘pink boxers’
and said, what on earth?” he recalled.

A visit to Google disclosed a Web site called pinkboxers and some
others that would make anyone — particularly at work — want to clear
out the browser. But the readers’ quest quickly became evident. They
were looking for a photograph from Afghanistan by David Guttenfelder of
The Associated Press that The Times ran at the top of page 1 on May 12.

It showed Specialist Zachary Boyd of Fort Worth, Tex., fighting the
Taliban alongside Specialist Cecil Montgomery and Specialist Jordan
Custer. It’s just that Specialist Boyd, who had rushed from his
sleeping quarters, was wearing nothing more under his armor than a red
T-shirt and pink boxer shorts emblazoned “I Love NY.” The image caused a nationwide sensation.

Mr. Guttenfelder, 40, is based in Tokyo and has worked for The
Associated Press since 1994. He was among the A.P. photographers
covering the 2008 earthquake in China who were finalists this year for the Pulitzer Prize in breaking news photography. At first, he didn’t know just how much comment his “pink boxers” shot had elicited stateside.

In an e-mail message to Michele McNally, an assistant manager editor
of The Times, Mr. Guttenfelder said it is “very hard to gauge the
impact of the photos while I’m out here in the bush.”

Ms. McNally was struck by the picture. “It had an impact on me
immediately,” she said. “Your first reaction is: ‘What? What’s going
on?’ Because you are smiling — and then you realize its meaning. War
never stops, look how intense it could get. You understand then that he
is fighting out of uniform, in underwear which reads “I Love NY,” in
the midst of really rough terrain in a remote region so very far from
home. And New York.

“And yet again, it calls up what mom said, ‘Always wear clean underwear, you never know.’”

May 22, 2009

A fortune coined from cheerfulness

By Rebecca Knight

Published: May 20 2009 03:00 | Last updated: May 20 2009 03:00

When
brothers Bert and John Jacobs were in their early 20s, they bought a
beat-up old Plymouth Voyager minivan - nicknamed "the Enterprise" -
stocked it full of T-shirts they had designed, and went on road trips
up and down the east coast selling their wares on college campuses.

They
covered their costs selling the shirts for about $10 apiece, but it was
a meagre existence. They slept in the van, lived on peanut butter and
jam sandwiches and every so often would scrounge to buy a pizza or rely
on one of their customers to sneak them into a school cafeteria.

"People
say, 'Oh that must have been tough.' But it wasn't that tough, we were
young and strong," shrugs John, the younger by three years. "There was
a hope it would lead to something big, but we were doing something we
liked to do. We were selling our artwork, travelling, meeting new
people, and watching the girls go by. On slow days, if the weather was
decent, we'd toss around a Frisbee."

Twenty years later, the
Jacobs brothers are still hawking T-shirts and still playing Frisbee.
As co-founders of Life is Good, a -Bostonbased apparel and accessories
company that last year had sales of $120m, the Jacobses
unapologetic-ally peddle a message of optimism and an appreciation for
the small pleasures of life.

Most of its merchandise - the
company offers more than 980 items, including dog beds, travel mugs and
tyre covers - features the company emblem, a stick figure named Jake,
enjoying a range of outdoor pastimes: swimming, camping, fishing and
golfing, to name a few. The core slogan is "Life is Good" but other
taglines include: "Take your sweet time", "Spread good vibes" and "Do
what you like, like what you do".

To cynical observers, this
un-abashed message of cheerfulness may come across as trite. But the
brothers - both of whom are six foot five and have a New England
mountain-man look, with ruddy complexions and unruly heads of ginger
hair - insist that this is a misinterpretation.

"The little
things in life are the big things," says Bert. "If you think you'll be
happier when you get that promotion or that two-car garage, you're
going to be waiting a long time."

Adds John: "It's not: life is
great, or life is perfect, or life is easy. It's not an exclamation
point. It's acknowledging that there is bad in the world, but don't
harp on it."

The brothers grew up in Needham, Massachusetts, a
suburb of Boston. Their father worked in a machine shop; their mother
was a homemaker who raised six children (they are the youngest
siblings.) They lived in a small house with four bedrooms and describe
their childhood as "happy chaos".

"Despite having limited funds,
Mom was always laughing and singing," recalls Bert. "She is a big part
of the inspiration for the brand."

After college, the two began
selling T-shirts at small-town street fairs and on college campuses,
and supplemented their income by supply teaching. At first, selling the
shirts, which featured abstract art or dancing figures, was just a bit
of fun, a "financially accessible way to go into business", according
to John. "But we also wanted to communicate a message."

During
long days on the road, the two discussed bigger ideas. "We talked about
the media inundating our culture with negative information. There's no
six o'clock news any more. There's only the six o'clock murder report,"
says Bert. "We wondered: is there something we could create that's
about what's right with the world, rather than what was wrong? Could we
create an icon that could be a symbol of optimism?"

In 1994, on a
hiatus from one of their road trips, the Jacobses threw a keg party. At
the time, they lived in a flat near Boston; their walls were covered
with drawings and they encouraged guests to be as artistic as they
wished.

The two noticed that their friends gravitated towards a
simple sketch by John: a cartoon face wearing a black beret, a pair of
sunglasses and a wide grin. Beneath the drawing, friends wrote things
such as: "This guy has life figured out" and "My hero".

They felt
they were on to something but they needed more consumer research. Their
solution: another kegger. They set up an easel in their living room and
on it wrote 50 sample mottos for their cartoon figure. Once again they
encouraged their friends to leave comments. "Life is good" was the
clear winner.

The Jacobses printed 48 T-shirts with a picture of
Jake and the winning motto. The next day they set up a booth at a
street fair in Cambridge, Massachusetts, home to Harvard and MIT. They
sold out in 45 minutes.

"It was all different kinds of people who
were buying them: skateboard punks, Harley-Davidson riders,
suit-and-tie guys who worked in the financial district, schoolteachers.
It was such a broad base," says Bert.

"In five-and-a-half years
of selling T-shirts, we hadn't seen anything like it," adds John.
"Half-way through the pile, we looked at each other: it was scary. We'd
finally found what we were looking for."

After the initial
success, the Jacobses took their idea direct to retailers and trade
shows in New York City. They had done this before with previous T-shirt
ventures but had had little success. This time, retailers were
receptive.

They had found their niche, but had no idea how to run
a business. They sent out shipments without invoices; they wrote orders
on top of old pizza boxes in their flat; they did not even own a fax
machine or a computer.

Kerrie Gross, a friend and neighbour who
worked as a paralegal, helped computerise the brothers' invoices and
run their day-to-day operations. "We had a financial guy tell us we'd
need to make $250,000 in sales in order to afford to hire an employee.
He might as well have told us we'd need to make $50bn," says John,
because it seemed like such an impossibly large sum.

In its first
year, the company made $260,000. They hired Ms Gross and a number of
other friends who remain partners in the business, in which the
Jacobses hold an 80 per cent stake. It earned $1.2m in 1997 and $2m in
1998. Today it has 4,500 distributors operating in 30 countries.

The brothers have no interest in selling their business, or taking it public. In the face of recession, they remain upbeat.

"Whether
the economy is up or down, or whether we're at war, people need
optimism," Bert says. "I think it was Churchill who said: 'I am
optimist. It does not seem to be much use being anything else'."

Charitable efforts for families whose lives are not so good

As
company chiefs, John and Bert Jacobs have perfected the playful
approach to doing business. As philanthropists, however, they are very
serious about their work.

The company's charitable efforts began
after September 11 2001. The brothers lost friends in the terrorist
attacks on the twin towers and company morale was low. "It was hard to
go to work at a place like Life is Good when employees were asking: 'Is
life not good?'" says Bert. The company designed American flag T-shirts
and donated the profits to United Way on behalf of families whose loved
ones died in the attacks.

The following year the brothers chose
two family-focused causes: Camp Sunshine, a retreat for children with
life-threatening diseases, and Project Joy, which offers play therapy
to traumatised children.

They organised an outdoor festival with
pie-eating contests, face painting and three-legged races. The Jacobs
brothers view their festivals as the ultimate expression of the Life is
Good brand. The events, often themed around pumpkins or watermelons,
are free. They make money by selling food and T-shirts, and from
donations. They have raised more than $4m for children's charities.

The
company has started its own foundation to distribute the money it
raises and this year will hold a festival in Toronto, its first outside
the US.

Beware bail-out kings and backbench barons

By John Kay

Published: May 19 2009 20:44 | Last updated: May 19 2009 20:44

Simon
Johnson’s comparison of corporate financiers with Russian oligarchs has
justifiably attracted attention. Mr Johnson, a former chief economist
at the International Monetary Fund, has written an article for the May
issue of The Atlantic entitled “The Quiet Coup”. He exaggerates for effect. But his underlying point is important.

When
a group becomes too rich and powerful, it can wield influence over
politics and over commercial activities in which its members are not
directly involved. The effect is to enhance that wealth and power. This
process is likely to end in political and economic crisis. That was the
history of royal courts across Europe, from Versailles to St
Petersburg. More recently, it has been the experience of many
developing countries and transitional economies. In the three decades
since Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan inaugurated the market
revolution, it appears that Britain and the US have joined their ranks.

There
is no direct connection between the financial turmoil and political
sleaze. Britain’s row over MPs’ expenses and America’s scandals over
congressional lobbying have their own specific origins. Yet there is an
indirect connection. Parliamentarians believe the taxpayer should pay
for their widescreen televisions and gardeners. Senior executives award
each other ever more generous remuneration packages. Bankers genuinely
believe that the state should carry off their toxic assets while they
continue with business and bonuses as before. All demonstrate an
exaggerated sense of entitlement.

Dukes and cardinals, oligarchs
and financiers, fixers and traders become very wealthy not by virtue of
their talents but as a result of the position they occupy. Legislators
and the heads of large corporations readily come to feel that their
functions deserve similar recognition. We may be relaxed that some
people do become filthy rich, but we should not be relaxed about how
they become so or how they behave once they are.

Few people
quibble about Bill Gates’ fortune, although they may occasionally think
that $50bn is rather a lot. They see the evident benefits of the
personal computer revolution that he helped to bring about. They can
admire the essential decency that has led him to devote much of his
time to finding charitable ways to spend his money. It is difficult to
think about bond salesmen in the same way, as it was difficult to feel
positive about the hangers-on at the court of Louis XVI.

We need
to reassert the notion that roles of authority are positions of
responsibility rather than declarations of personal merit and routes to
personal enrichment. That notion goes with old-fashioned concepts of
social obligation and public service. An insistence that power is a
duty, not a prize, is probably the most important reason why some
countries in the world are rich and others poor. The point needs to be
brought home in equal measure to legislators, chief executives and
bankers.

Historians would find much that is familiar in today’s
developments. In Washington, the young, fresh King Obama finds his
economic councils filled by representatives of the same interests who
advised his predecessor so unwisely. At the Palace of Westminster, the
failing, flailing King Gordon surrounds himself more tightly with his
trusted advisers, venturing forth occasionally only to address his
subjects from a safe distance by YouTube.

When crisis strikes,
the powerful barons react initially by using their power to protect
themselves from the worst of the storm. So the banks receive trillions
in state aid. Only if the anger of the populace grows large enough, or
the resources of the state are exhausted, does a counter-coup provoke
change. Breaking the political power of the financial services industry
will not happen easily. That power may survive this crisis – as it
survived the last. When the New Economy bubble burst in 2000, enough
money was pumped into the system to sustain the establishment and
pacify the population. Minor courtiers were executed but the essential
power structure remained. But, as Louis XVI learnt as the guillotine
fell, the longer reform is delayed, the bloodier the revolution. And
the more unsettled and chaotic would be the eventual outcome for us all.

May 17, 2009

Communism,
Brown notes, tended to have a greater appeal in peasant societies such
as China and Vietnam than in the world’s advanced industrial countries.
How was the revolution ever going to triumph in the US when, as
happened in the interwar years, an American communist agitator would
begin his speeches in New York with the immortal words: “Workers and
peasants of Brooklyn!”

Russia was a largely peasant society when
the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917 – a condition that changed only
after Josef Stalin carried out a crash industrialisation plan in the
1930s. Millions of peasants were exterminated or died in the famine,
and millions of citizens of all types were sent to labour camps and
into exile. Still more millions, however, benefited from Stalin’s
terror by filling the jobs and school places left empty by the dead and
the incarcerated. They used the opportunity to climb the urban social
ladder.

Hunt
correctly portrays Engels as not merely Marx’s right-hand man but an
important political philosopher in his own right, a gifted writer whose
savage analysis of Victorian social conditions sounds remarkably fresh
to this day. “As our post-1989 liberal utopia of free trade and western
democracy totters under the strain of both religious orthodoxy and
free-market fundamentalism, his critique speaks down the ages,” writes
Hunt. “The cosy collusion of government and capital; the corporate
flight for cheap labour and low skills; the restructuring of family
life around the proclivities of the market; the inevitable retreat of
tradition in the face of modernity, and the vital interstices of
colonialism and capitalism; the military as a component of the
industrial complex; and even the design of our cities as dictated by
the demands of capital.”

Of
course, the impact of the Communist manifesto down the generations
might not have been quite the same if English-language versions had
stuck with the quirky translation used in the first edition: “A
frightful hobgoblin stalks through Europe.”

As Vincent Barnett
points out in his concise and reliable introduction to Marx’s thought,
understanding Marx requires us to grasp that his ideas were neither
static nor a coherent, empirically proven set of laws about economics,
social systems and history. He revised and reshaped his ideas
throughout his lifetime. In 1877 he even wrote that Russia had a chance
to bypass the capitalist stage of development and move straight to
socialism – a suggestion that, taken at face value, completely blew
apart his previous theories of economically determined historical
progress.

When liberal western values were under siege in the cold war, there were two ways to hit back at the Marxist foe.

One
was to observe that communism, far from producing a prosperous,
class-free society where human beings developed their potential to the
utmost, had brought repression and modest living standards at best,
tyranny and famine at worst. Whatever the theory, the practice stank.
The second riposte was to point out that the theory stank too. As a
prophecy of mankind’s future, supposedly based on scientifically
discovered laws of historical development, Marxism-Leninism was pure
twaddle.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Capitalism
in advanced countries had not succumbed to socialist revolution. It
had, in fact, gone from strength to strength. Workers had not grown
increasingly impoverished. Indeed, they had become healthier and
wealthier. In countries such as Russia and China where self-styled
communists had seized power, the state had not “withered away”, as Marx
and Engels predicted, but had evolved into an instrument of supremely
vicious political control.

How do matters stand today? Capitalism
is in its worst shape since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Are Marx
and Engels about to be proved right after all? It would be rash to bet
on it. Still, the three books considered here serve as a reminder that,
almost 20 years after the fall of the Berlin wall and the demise of
Soviet communism (though not the unusual Chinese version), some of the
criticisms that Marx and Engels levelled at mid-19th century capitalist
economic systems do not appear out of place 150 years later.

Archie Brown’s
The Rise and Fall of Communism is
comprehensive and impressive, as we would expect from a scholar who has
been one of Britain’s foremost experts on communism for the past 40
years. The book covers the same ground as Robert Service’s 2007 work, Comrades!: A History of World Communism, but it offers a stronger interpretation of the factors affecting communism’s rise, ability to stay in power and downfall.

Communism,
Brown notes, tended to have a greater appeal in peasant societies such
as China and Vietnam than in the world’s advanced industrial countries.
How was the revolution ever going to triumph in the US when, as
happened in the interwar years, an American communist agitator would
begin his speeches in New York with the immortal words: “Workers and
peasants of Brooklyn!”

Russia was a largely peasant society when
the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917 – a condition that changed only
after Josef Stalin carried out a crash industrialisation plan in the
1930s. Millions of peasants were exterminated or died in the famine,
and millions of citizens of all types were sent to labour camps and
into exile. Still more millions, however, benefited from Stalin’s
terror by filling the jobs and school places left empty by the dead and
the incarcerated. They used the opportunity to climb the urban social
ladder.

An eye for the telling anecdote characterises Brown’s
prose. Illustrating the Soviet practice of wiping out disgraced people
from the historical record, he recalls the 1952 arrest by Stalin’s
security police of Vladimir Zelenin, a prominent medical scientist.
Zelenin’s disappearance made it necessary for the compilers of the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia
to replace the entry on Zelenin with an article on something else
beginning with Zel-. With their options limited, they hit upon zelenaya lyagushka
(the green frog), a choice that permitted the British scholar Alec Nove
to comment years later that this was “the only known instance of a
professor actually turning into a frog”.

As Brown shows, the
communist era was replete with such incidents, sinister and grimly
hilarious. At the peak of his dictatorship Stalin delighted in making
the stocky Nikita Khrushchev, his successor as Soviet leader, dance the
gopak, a vigorous Ukrainian folk dance. “When Stalin says dance, a wise
man dances,” Khrushchev glumly told a fellow Politburo member.

Khrushchev
was likewise humiliated in 1958 by Mao Zedong, a powerful swimmer who
insisted to the less aquatically proficient Soviet leader that they
should hold their discussions in the swimming pool. As Mao swam
effortlessly around expounding his radical political theories,
Khrushchev spluttered his answers between mouthfuls of water.

Although
Brown covers the communist experience in China, south-east Asia and
Cuba, he is at his most fluent and convincing when he analyses the
Soviet Union and eastern Europe between 1945 and 1989. He contends
that, no matter how economically inefficient and politically unpopular
the Soviet and eastern European regimes were, it required reformers
from within – above all, Mikhail Gorbachev – to make the moves that
would prompt the system’s collapse.

“There is no automatic link
between economic failure and collapse of a communist regime if all the
resources of an oppressive state are brought to bear to keep its rulers
in office,” Brown writes. The tight grip on power held in North Korea
by Kim Jong-il and, before him, by his father Kim Il-sung support
Brown’s argument.

Even Poland’s Solidarity free trade union, a
mass anti-communist movement if ever there was one, stood no chance in
December 1981 when the Polish communist party and armed forces imposed
martial law. Brown’s chapter on the Prague spring, meanwhile, shows how
easy it was for the Soviet Union to crush a reform movement whose
origins lay largely in the ruling party itself.

Only the
intervention of western powers might have made a difference but
President Dwight Eisenhower had signalled in 1956, during the Hungarian
uprising, that the US – for all its rhetoric about freedom – would not
risk a world war in order to “roll back” communism in eastern Europe.

One
issue that deserves more attention than it receives from Brown concerns
the leadership styles of men such as Wladyslaw Gomulka of Poland,
Gustav Husak of Czechoslovakia and Janos Kadar of Hungary. All suffered
at the hands of their fellow communists after 1945; all were thrown
into prison before returning to hold power for long spells in their
respective countries. All witnessed the Soviet Union apply armed force,
or menacing political pressure, to halt steps towards liberalisation.

In
what way did Soviet intimidation and the experience of persecution by
their own colleagues shape their understanding of how to govern a
one-party state? Kadar, and to a lesser extent Gomulka, eased the
suffocating political conditions in their countries but Husak decidedly
did not. What is certain is that none of them lost their faith in
communism.

One wonders what Marx and Engels would have made of
the murderous Stalin, the megalomaniac Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania,
the paranoid Enver Hoxha of Albania and other blood-stained despots who
claimed to be putting their theories into practice. As Tristram Hunt, a
British historian, makes clear in his excellent, lively biography, The Frock-Coated Communist,
Engels could hardly have been a more different personality: “A raffish,
high-living, heavy-drinking devotee of the good things in life: lobster
salad, Château Margaux, Pilsener beer and expensive women.”

Hunt
correctly portrays Engels as not merely Marx’s right-hand man but an
important political philosopher in his own right, a gifted writer whose
savage analysis of Victorian social conditions sounds remarkably fresh
to this day. “As our post-1989 liberal utopia of free trade and western
democracy totters under the strain of both religious orthodoxy and
free-market fundamentalism, his critique speaks down the ages,” writes
Hunt. “The cosy collusion of government and capital; the corporate
flight for cheap labour and low skills; the restructuring of family
life around the proclivities of the market; the inevitable retreat of
tradition in the face of modernity, and the vital interstices of
colonialism and capitalism; the military as a component of the
industrial complex; and even the design of our cities as dictated by
the demands of capital.”

Yet as Hunt observes, the contradictions
between Engels’ communist ideology and personal circumstances were
glaring. Engels spent much of his life as a wealthy textile
manufacturer in Manchester, a typical capitalist extracting the surplus
labour value of the downtrodden proletariat. At his death Engels owned
thousands of bottles of fine champagne, claret and port.

One
defence was that he made regular transfers of large sums of money to
Marx in London. Marx, labouring away in the British Museum and stuck
with a family with impeccably bourgeois tastes, needed Engels’ help
because, if anything, he was even worse at managing his personal
finances than he was at predicting the future.

What Marx and Engels excelled at was political polemics. At the age of 25 in 1844, Engels wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England, an indictment of Victorian capitalism. Three years later, he and Marx published the even more inspirational Manifesto of the Communist Party, with its unforgettable opening line: “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.”

Of
course, the impact of the Communist manifesto down the generations
might not have been quite the same if English-language versions had
stuck with the quirky translation used in the first edition: “A
frightful hobgoblin stalks through Europe.”

As Vincent Barnett
points out in his concise and reliable introduction to Marx’s thought,
understanding Marx requires us to grasp that his ideas were neither
static nor a coherent, empirically proven set of laws about economics,
social systems and history. He revised and reshaped his ideas
throughout his lifetime. In 1877 he even wrote that Russia had a chance
to bypass the capitalist stage of development and move straight to
socialism – a suggestion that, taken at face value, completely blew
apart his previous theories of economically determined historical
progress.

Barnett organises his book into pairs of chapters: the
first of each pair deals with Marx’s life and practical work; the
second with his political thought. This structure is useful in
conveying to readers how Marx’s ideas were constantly evolving.

How
dangerous was Marxism as an ideology in its heyday? Do Marx and Engels
bear responsibility for how communism turned out in practice? Hunt and
Barnett are in agreement that one cannot blame the appalling Soviet and
Chinese utopian experiments on two German-born intellectuals writing 50
to 100 years earlier.

That is surely correct. Nevertheless,
Marx’s vision of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” that would usher
in communism was wide open to abuse by fanatics such as Vladimir Lenin,
Stalin and Mao.

Mikhail Bakunin, the 19th-century Russian
anarchist whom Marx regarded with contempt, sensed this better than any
of his contemporaries. With a prescience that turned out to be
tragically accurate, Bakunin denounced Marx’s pronouncements on the
rule of the proletariat as “lies, behind which lurks the despotism of a
governing minority”. It is a lesson for which Russia and China are
still paying the price today.

Nocturnes

“Writing
about music,” somebody once said, “is like dancing about architecture.”
The quotation – which has been variously attributed to Elvis Costello,
Frank Zappa and Clara Schumann among others – stands as a warning to
writers who might want to use musicians as their central characters. It
may seem an appealing way of exploring themes of creativity and
artistic endeavour without slipping into the terrible self-indulgence
of “writing about writing”. But chances are you will find yourself
bogged down either in meaningless abstraction or, at the other extreme,
technical impenetrability.

In his new story cycle, Nocturnes,
Kazuo Ishiguro sidesteps these pitfalls with his characteristic,
unassuming elegance. He has been careful with his choice of musical
reference points. Most of the characters are writers or performers of
music: a washed-up lounge singer; the guitarist in a café orchestra in
Venice’s St Mark’s Square; a brilliant saxophone player who has never
quite made it to the big time. Crucially, their repertoire consists of
jazz standards and light orchestral favourites, and in this way
Ishiguro manages to dodge the near-impossible task of describing the
music in words: the soundscape of the stories is already embedded in
our collective consciousness.

These are not really stories about
music, in any case, but relationship studies, with an emphasis on
celebrity and what it takes to be a success or a failure in the modern
world. Humour has always been a feature of Ishiguro’s work – I happen
to find The Unconsoled and The Remains of the Day two of
the funniest books of the past 20 years. But perhaps never so strongly
as here: all five tales have a rueful, melancholy wit, and two of them
are out-and-out farces. Their recurrent procedure is to keep the
characters’ motivation concealed for as long as possible, beneath a
veneer of polite, oblique conversation, and then – when it is finally
disclosed – to surprise the reader with the extent of their venality or
cold-heartedness.

Each story throws its own quiet curveball, so
it would be unfair to discuss the plots in detail. The first one,
however, entitled simply “Crooner”, might stand as a kind of template
for the whole collection. Entertaining the tourists at a café in St
Mark’s Square, a guitarist from an unnamed former communist country
spots a famous American singer, Tony Gardner, sitting at one of the
tables. He joins him, falls into conversation, and is soon aware of a
certain tension between Gardner and his wife.

These stories
will often zoom in on the relationship between romantic partners or a
married couple, and adopt the perspective of a watchful third party,
observing alertly from the sidelines, a little bit puzzled as to what
is really going on.

When he is asked to accompany Gardner that
night as he serenades his wife beneath the balcony of their palazzo,
the guitarist assumes that this is a sentimental gesture aimed at
winning back her affections. The reverse is true: this is a
valediction, because, regretfully but ruthlessly, Gardner has decided
to leave his wife, sensing that to trade her in for a younger model
will provide a boost to his flagging career.

Gardner’s serenade
is beautifully described, in such a way that there’s no doubting its
warmth and sincerity. That it is a loving gesture, which nonetheless
coincides with an utterly heartless decision, is all part of the absurd
nature of human relationships which Ishiguro observes so coolly. Music,
he implies, provides one of the few possible oases of stillness and
respite from this absurdity, and from the chaos it unleashes.

This
sense is conveyed even more in the second story, “Come Rain or Come
Shine”. Two old university friends, whose reunion has already descended
into farcical embarrassment, take a few minutes out to dance together
to the tune of Sarah Vaughan singing “April in Paris”, before
attempting to rebuild their shattered relationship. “I knew it was a
long track, at least eight minutes. I felt pleased about that, because
I knew after the song ended, we wouldn’t dance any more ... But for
another few minutes at least, we were safe, and we kept dancing under
the starlit sky.”

That mention of “starlit sky”, incidentally, is
about as poetic as Ishiguro gets. One of the many remarkable features
of his writing is its glorious plainness: each of these stories is told
in the voice of a laconic, colloquial first-person narrator, with no
recourse to metaphor or extravagant figures of speech, and yet comes
loaded with enormous emotional weight. Most bad literary writing is bad
because it is too fussy, too showy on the surface: in order to see
through clearly to the depths beneath, you need something much harder
to achieve – a perfect stillness. Ishiguro is a master of that
stillness, and each one of these five delightful stories shows why.